The War Gets Uncivil

“My general sense was that when Jemas was around, that was a low point in the rivalry.”

—Deadpool artist Scott Koblish

“Rivalries,” writer Peter David says, “derive from who’s in charge, and depending on who was in charge at Marvel or DC at the time, we either got along swell or there was hostility.”

Mark down the early twenty-first century as one of those hostile periods.

The days of two best friends being in charge at both companies were gone—Marvel’s executive editor Mark Gruenwald had died suddenly in 1996—and toward the end of the 1990s the Marvel-DC rivalry grew coarser, eerily mirroring the shift happening generally in society. It was a time in America when civility was dying. The political discourse reached a new level of nastiness with the election of George W. Bush. The growing prevalence of the Internet and its culture of online commentary made it easier and cheaper than ever to disseminate trollish criticism. In entertainment reality TV personalities hurled insults at one another for our amusement.

Following the 1996 bankruptcy filing Marvel had endured several depressing years of staff layoffs, belt-tightening, and low morale. Its very survival teetered on the brink as various vultures attempted to swoop in and pick the carcass clean—including Stan Lee, who claimed to have joined forces with Michael Jackson in an unsuccessful bid to buy the company.

With more important issues to worry about, the rivalry was put on the back burner for a few years.

“Marvel didn’t really affect us that much then,” says Tom Palmer Jr., a former DC editor and the son of the legendary inker. “It was almost like the person you were fighting against wasn’t really there. You got the impression that things weren’t that organized at Marvel. They were trying to get their footing back.”

The company emerged from bankruptcy at the end of the century, and with its new lease on life came a management shake-up. In January 2000 Bill Jemas, a former Marvel executive, returned to the company to serve as the new president, initiating an era of enmity between the longtime rivals, the likes of which had not been seen before.

Jemas was a Harvard-educated tax attorney who’d once worked for the National Basketball Association. He’d first come to Marvel in the early 1990s through card company Fleer, which Marvel had purchased.

“Bill Jemas had been brought over from trading cards, and when I got there [in 1996] there was really nothing for him to do,” says former publisher Shirrel Rhoades. “He was playing around with children’s products, like coloring books, that didn’t go anywhere. He was kind of restless and left shortly thereafter.”

Jemas went to work at Madison Square Garden in 1997, organizing special events and working with merchandising. From there he was recruited to return to Marvel and run it.

“I remember being in the bullpen when Jemas came in,” says artist and former Marvel assistant editor Gregg Schigiel. “It was like the fourth president in my time there. They announced Jemas, and there was a rumble in the bullpen like, ‘Oh, boy,’ because everyone knew who he was. There was a bit of like, ‘This isn’t going to go well’ vibe in the air.”

Jemas admitted that he had never read a comic before working for Marvel, and he had a brash, in-your-face personality that rubbed some the wrong way.

“He was enthusiastic, he was passionate, and some of it was tough love and some of it was tough humor,” says Bob Greenberger, a former DC editor whom Jemas brought to Marvel in 2001. “There were some staffers he would just ridicule and ride. He gave people nicknames that were borderline bothersome. And he thought it was funny, and he never stopped to realize these people were suffering.”

Shortly after being handed Marvel’s reins, Jemas cut editor-in-chief Bob Harras loose and promoted Joe Quesada. Quesada was a Queens-born, Mets-loving artist who had worked for both Marvel and DC. He was a casual presence, with a doughy build; an earring; spiky, bleached hair; and a wardrobe that favored T-shirts over suits. He’d been hired in the midst of Marvel’s bankruptcy woes to run a nearly autonomous new imprint called Marvel Knights that offered edgier, creator-driven takes on some of the company’s then-stagnating heroes. Quesada recruited Clerks filmmaker Kevin Smith in 1998 to write Daredevil and tapped Irish-born Garth Ennis to provide a wonderfully vulgar take on vigilante the Punisher.

Quesada and Jemas came out swinging, determined to return Marvel to greatness by dragging it out of the financial morass it had been stuck in and shaking off the creative inertia that had dogged the company for years. Marvel would once again become the scrappy, cutting-edge publisher it had been back in its 1960s heyday.

And one important aspect of their plan was to rekindle the rivalry with DC to a blistering, openly antagonistic level that hadn’t been seen since the days of Stan Lee sniping at “Brand Echh.” Marvel comics were the best in the world, and Jemas and Quesada were going to let everyone, including those unfortunate souls at DC, know it.

If Survivor and The Real World and other popular shows at the time have taught us anything, it’s that conflict equals audience engagement.

“I liked it when the two companies hated each other,” Quesada said in 2002. “It made it better for the fans. You know, if you like DC, then you hated Marvel. If you like Marvel, then you hated DC.”

“Bill had come from sports, and he had that instinct of team rivalry,” says Stuart Moore, a former DC editor who went to Marvel in 2000. “He wanted to stir up the fans to root for one side or the other. And he really liked to tweak the DC people, who had a tendency to take themselves a bit seriously. He loved to taunt them. He was into causing trouble.”

Unlike previous presidents who preferred to remain behind the scenes, Jemas saw himself as the public face of the company. He quickly became the industry’s latest answer to P. T. Barnum—a loudmouthed carnival barker who was quick with a boast or attention-grabbing sound bite. He held regular press conferences, penned an online fan question-and-answer column, and generally did his best to thump his chest about the company at every turn. And one of his favorite ways to do it was to take a poke at the “Distinguished Competition.” He seemed to have a put-down for every dollar of his $505,000 salary.

He regularly referred to DC, whose parent company Time Warner had recently been acquired by an online giant, as “AOL” simply because he knew it irked them.

He regularly ribbed his rival for the poor sales and quality of its titles, once saying, “Somewhere somebody wrote down this rule that comic books are supposed to suck, and the vast majority of what is published by our competition … closely adheres to that rule.”

Upon seeing the original 2002 Spider-Man movie, he proclaimed it so good that “DC could do a Spider-Man comic and it wouldn’t hurt the character.”

In 2001, when DC censored issues of writer Mark Millar’s The Authority, an ultraviolent, R-rated look at superheroes, Jemas publicly offered to publish the banned comics, generously offering DC a 10 percent royalty. He later clarified that he’d meant to say 10 cents.

Jemas imagined his antics harkened back to the days of Stan Lee, but his tone was harsher, more fit for the blunter twenty-first century. His swipes seriously ticked off the more sensitive employees of DC.

“Stan did it with class. Stan did it in such a way that you couldn’t take offense,” says former Marvel editor Glenn Greenberg. “I know for a fact that the DC folks were taking it really seriously and personally, and there were a lot of bad feelings and they were really hurt. I know that at the senior level people were taking it personally.”

Jemas was especially exuberant in his antagonism of Paul Levitz, who in 2002, after some thirty years at the company, had ascended to become DC’s president and publisher, following Jenette Kahn’s departure. Levitz was an intense, cerebral figure who didn’t suffer fools. He had a reputation for conservatism and loathed gossip and the airing of the industry’s dirty laundry—in other words, the perfect foil for Jemas’s sophomoric shenanigans.

Jemas penned a taunting foreword to Marvel 2000–2001 Year in Review: Fanboys and Badgirls, Bill and Joe’s Marvelous Adventure, a worshipful, 2002 hardcover detailing the first year under the company’s new regime. In it he took a flamethrower to Levitz and his management of DC.

“Those who love him say it’s because Levitz wants to shield his creators and characters from the commercial exploitation and corruption that could come from mass media exploitation,” Jemas continued. “Those who loathe him say Levitz is a man with teeny talents, who keeps the industry tiny to protect his own power over truly bright and talented creators.”

Jemas’s masterstroke of childish antagonism came with a satirical 2002 limited series he wrote called Marville. The comic was little more than a vehicle for a series of gags aimed at DC and its parent company.

The story concerned a Superman-like character—the title Marville was a play on the DC TV series Smallville—whose parents send him back to our era from the year 5002. The boy, whose name was KalAOL (Superman’s real name is Kal-El), struggled to make his way in our world, his only possession an AOL DVD with one hundred free minutes.

The series took personal shots at everyone from Time Warner executive Ted Turner to Levitz—a shocking breach of protocol in an industry where the competition had always been fierce but rarely nasty. Marville #1 opened with a text page introduction that read in part, “Marvel’s Distinguished Competition (DC Comics) is run by a man named Paul Levitz who fights a never-ending battle to keep his business obscure. This is no small feat as DC owns Batman and Superman.”

“Because it was Jemas, everybody thought, oh it’s just Bill being Bill,” says former Marvel editor Greenberger. “We were more dismissive or more embarrassed than angry by it.”

Not the case at DC.

“Jemas was a real terror for DC,” says former DC editor Raspler. “He sort of broke the rules, the gentleman’s agreement. He crossed lines, which was thrilling for his supporters and scandalous for his targets. We all talked about it.”

Even though Jemas’s antics rubbed many in DC the wrong way and they were dying to respond, the staff was forbidden from retaliating publicly. No one, they were told, was to speak to the press about the feud. When one DC staffer asked about Jemas’s provocations, Levitz just shrugged his shoulders and said, “What are you gonna do?”

Jemas and Quesada’s methods may have turned off some in the industry, but much like Simon Cowell hurling nasty put-downs on American Idol, readers seemed to eat them up. The new management began pulling Marvel out of the bankruptcy doldrums, helping the comic book business as a whole, which, in recent decades, had been overly dependent on Marvel. One year after Jemas and Quesada came to power, the industry reversed seven straight years of decline to register modest growth. Marvel in 2001 opened up a six-point lead in direct market share over DC after the two were locked in a near dead heat in 2000. By 2002 the lead was eleven points.

“[Jemas and Quesada’s pugilistic style] may well have helped them. They were scrappy at a time when a lot of folks might have been willing to write them off,” says former DC editor and writer Brian Augustyn. “It certainly rallied fans. Jemas was looking to create kind of the exclusivity of, ‘You belong to a rare club.’”

The product undeniably got better under the new leadership. Early in their tenure Jemas and Quesada wrote up a twenty-page publishing plan detailing the changes they hoped to bring to Marvel. It called for less reverence for the status quo and a demand for higher quality.

The duo looked to recruit new creators and to make Marvel’s comics more accessible to readers. Jemas felt that Marvel’s editors and creators were too beholden to their fanboy sides, producing insular, self-referential storylines that required decades of knowledge to read—“comics about comics” Jemas called them.

He lamented the fact that many of Marvel’s core heroes had been allowed to grow up and change. In the days of Amazing Spider-Man #1, Peter Parker was a nerdy high school loser who couldn’t catch a break. Now he was in his twenties, long out of college, and married to a supermodel, Mary Jane. Jemas joked that soon they’d probably be publishing a story arc about his prostate issues.

Part of the solution was to launch a brand-new line of comics called Ultimate, aimed at unburdening the characters from decades of continuity. The stories would start over at the beginning, feature younger versions of the heroes, and officially take place outside the canon Marvel universe. Ultimate Spider-Man #1, released in September 2000, retold the hero’s origin with a modern sensibility. Ultimate X-Men followed, as well as The Ultimates, a contemporary take on the Avengers by writer Mark Millar that served as a blueprint for 2012’s The Avengers film.

Jemas and Quesada also pushed the editorial department to take more chances and to tell stories that Marvel had been afraid to tell previously. At the time one of the biggest mysteries in the Marvel universe was the origin of Wolverine, the ultra-popular, virtually indestructible member of the X-Men. Only fragments of his backstory had been revealed over the character’s twenty-five-year history, in part because no one knew what it was. (An unproduced 1984 X-Men screenplay by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway said Wolverine had been given his metal skeleton after a car accident.) Editorial was also fearful that telling the story would ruin the character. All it took was a financial shortfall to change all that.

“One time one of our financial guys came into me and Jemas, and he said a couple projects had fallen off the table,” former Marvel publishing operations director Greenberger says. “He said, ‘We’re going to have an $800,000 shortfall this year if we don’t do something.’ That’s when Jemas said, ‘Well, I guess it’s time to do Wolverine’s origin.’”

The six-issue miniseries called Origin appeared in 2001 and revealed that Wolverine—aka Logan—had been born James Howlett to a wealthy Canadian family. He was cast out into the wilderness following the murder of his father. The gamble to finally tell the tale paid off. The series was a big hit, finishing near the top of the charts for the year.

The new Marvel regime also opened up its pages to more mature content. In 2001 the company launched Max, an imprint for adults that included Alias, writer Brian Michael Bendis’s hard-boiled series about a female detective that was turned into the hit 2015 Netflix series Jessica Jones. (The series was so spicy that Marvel’s Alabama-based printer refused to print it.)

Jemas also made the controversial decision to remove Marvel from the Comics Code Authority—the censoring body that had been policing content since the 1950s. Marvel management resented paying an outside body to monitor its books and considered the Code irrelevant for the twenty-first century and Marvel’s increasingly older readers. It was also inconsistent. In April 2001 the governing body had asked Marvel to remove certain words from one of their comics but had allowed them in an issue of Superman.

Jemas decided it was time for Marvel to pull out.

The other major publishers—DC, Archie, and Dark Horse—were opposed to Marvel’s decision, and a meeting was called at Marvel’s office.

Code meetings were held regularly, and often one or two representatives attended from each company. In this case Paul Levitz and executive editor Mike Carlin represented DC, while Michael Silberkleit repped Archie.

As for Marvel’s contingent, Jemas had a surprise in store. To tweak DC’s nose, he decided to pack the conference room with the various Marvel employees he’d recently poached, despite the fact that none had ever attended before and that the extra bodies had no business being there. Jemas dragged Bob Greenberger, Stuart Moore, and former Vertigo editors Jennifer Lee and Axel Alonso into the room.

“He put us there to basically be the peanut gallery,” Greenberger says. “Bill was having the time of his life. He thought it was hysterical.”

“It irritated the DC people,” Moore says. “It was a strange meeting, a little uncomfortable.”

When questioned why Marvel had brought the unnecessary staffers, Jemas contended that the number of people from each company was in direct correlation to sales.

The sides also began arguing over the Code, with DC and Archie advocating for staying in it. Abandoning the Code, they argued, might draw unwanted attention and force the government to step in. Silberkleit at one point produced a thick file containing clippings from the 1950s anticomics crusade and warned it could happen again. Levitz cautioned that senators might be coming for the industry again.

“Quite frankly, Paul,” Jemas replied, “I’m more scared of sentinels than senators,” referencing the killer robots from the X-Men comics.

Marvel began using its own in-house ratings system, and as has happened so often in this business, DC—at first so violently opposed to Marvel’s progressive stance—eventually came around. It likewise abandoned the Code in January 2011, long after everyone had ceased to care.

The antagonism between the companies would only grow, but before it got to the point of no return, Marvel and DC had been able to play nice long enough to finally negotiate the publication of one of the greatest unfinished projects in comics history, the white whale of fandom, JLA/Avengers. The series had been started then ultimately abandoned back in 1983 after the two sides had been unable to agree on a plot and creative direction. Fans never gave up hope, and through the years rumors that it would finally be completed would trickle out, but no firm announcement ever came, even after Marvel and DC began cooperating on a new round of crossovers in the mid-1990s.

Finally, in March 2001, it became official. The announcement was made at an Orlando, Florida, convention that JLA/Avengers was back on track and was scheduled to hit shelves the next year. It was to be drawn by its original artist George Perez and written by Kurt Busiek, an Avengers scribe and the cocreator of Marvels, an acclaimed and influential 1994 miniseries that offered a realistic, ground-level view of the Marvel universe through the eyes of its nonsuperpowered inhabitants.

Through the years DC and Marvel had spoken occasionally about restarting JLA/Avengers, but circumstances always conspired to prevent it.

“People think about [the delays] as Marvel and DC are mad at each other, and it’s not usually something like that,” Busiek says. “What it was about is that these companies are owned by larger corporations and these larger corporations interact.”

In one case a potential JLA/Avengers deal was tabled after Marvel and Time Warner squabbled over some petty international deal involving, of all things, sticker licensing. One of Marvel’s European publishing companies subsequently bought an Italian company that had a license to produce DC stickers, meaning the company never did produce the DC stickers. Bickering between the two parties over money ensued.

“Literally, sticker licensing derailed JLA/Avengers,” Busiek says. “But then the skies cleared. I think it was Joe Quesada who called DC and said, ‘No one is mad at anyone at the moment. Let’s do it.’”

Because the series had been so anticipated, the creators involved were determined to do it justice and make it richer than your typical Marvel-DC crossover.

“When we originally sat down to talk about the story, one of the first things we agreed on is that we didn’t want to do the standard kind of crossover where you have to have the exact same number of villains per universe, and each side has to have the exact number of panels, and all fights have to end in a draw,” Busiek says. “It’s about doing a square dance where everything balances rather than doing a story that has drama and surprises. And everybody flat out said yes.”

The plot involved two godlike entities who, in a bit of cosmic gameplay, send each team on an interdimensional scavenger hunt, tasking the heroes with collecting twelve powerful artifacts. The heroes travel to each other’s universes in search of the booty and, because this is a comic book, eventually come into conflict during the pursuit.

Unlike the earliest Marvel-DC pairings, JLA/Avengers came after decades of similar crossovers, and seasoned readers had become familiar with the format and the industry’s tropes. That familiarity allowed the creators to have a little fun, adding a layer of sly, meta-commentary about the fundamental differences between the DC and Marvel universes.

“We played off the old sixties reputations of the two universes, where in the Marvel universe, the heroes have to struggle, and once they win the day, people throw things at them,” Busiek says. “And over in DC Superman is a citizen of every country in the world, the Flash has a museum. They’re practically a pantheon.”

When the Avengers arrives in the DC universe for the time, they’re dismayed by the city’s clean modernity and the way the public idolizes the heroes.

“This is quite some world,” Marvel’s mutant speedster Quicksilver notes while taking a look around the Flash museum. “Heroes are respected, not hounded.”

Meanwhile Superman and the Justice League are disappointed that the Avengers, with all their power, have failed to usher in a utopia.

“I’m not impressed,” Superman growls. “Not with their world, not with their achievements.”

The creators included other knowing winks for fans. The best line went to Hawkeye, who noted the Justice League’s similarity to a certain team of Marvel heroes that had been created as an homage.

“These losers—they’re nothing but a bunch of Squadron Supreme wannabes,” Hawkeye cracks.

Perez, who’d been waiting nearly twenty years to finally tackle the project, went nuts. When Busiek asked him which of the dozens of characters who’d been members of the Avengers and Justice League over the years he’d like to draw, Perez replied, “All of them.” He didn’t disappoint. He peppered the series with detailed pages filled with so many figures that they were downright Where’s Waldo–esque in their awe-inspiring clutter. His cover to issue #3 contained a whopping 208 heroes. It was such a big job that it literally gave the artist tendinitis and delayed the release of #4 by a few weeks.

The series ended on a hopeful note, with the DC and Marvel characters acknowledging the regard they have for one another before being returned to their respective universes. “Perhaps we should do this again someday,” the final page reads.

But it was not to be. Unbeknownst to readers and the staffs at the time, JLA/Avengers, released in September 2003, was to be the final Marvel-DC crossover. Not that there wasn’t a push for more.

After the companies had managed to play nice on JLA/Avengers, the prospect of future cooperation seemed hopeful. Why couldn’t the companies work out a deal where they partnered to release a slate of team-ups, as they’d done back in the late 1970s?

In the spring of 2001, shortly after JLA/Avengers had been announced, Marvel’s Greenberger brokered a lunch between the two sides. DC’s executive editor Mike Carlin and sales and marketing chief Bob Wayne sat down with Marvel’s editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, president Bill Jemas, and Greenberger in an attempt to kickstart the crossovers. It did not go well.

“I think they wanted to take each others’ temperature to see if they really could work together, and one lunch later they knew they couldn’t,” Greenberger says. “It was like two rival countries that were never going to see eye to eye. They just didn’t like each other. Bill was mocking everything about DC, and Bob Wayne was bristling. It was just not a comfortable lunch.”

Even with Greenberger proposing a springboard for a crossover that had villain Lex Luthor, who at the time had been elected president in the DC universe, declaring war on Latveria, the stronghold of Marvel’s Doctor Doom, nothing came of the meeting. The two sides parted ways grumpy and without agreeing to any future team-ups. The worst acrimony was, unfortunately, yet to come.

Of Marvel’s two public faces, Quesada had generally been more well behaved than Jemas, preferring to play good cop to the boss’s bad. Like Jemas, he had a cocky, showman quality to him and became a regular media presence, but his musings rarely rose to the inflammatory, DEFCON-1 level that Jemas’s did.

That all changed in April 2002.

The interview Quesada gave to the New York Observer was supposed to be little more than a puff piece promoting Marvel’s plans in conjunction with the upcoming Spider-Man movie. Instead it became arguably the most damaging single provocation in the rivalry’s history. In the interview Quesada let rip with a series of digs at DC that would drive a nearly irreparable wedge between the companies and chill relations—perhaps for all time.

“What the fuck is DC anyway?” Quesada railed in the Observer piece. “They’d be better off calling it AOL Comics. At least people know what AOL is. I mean, they have Batman and Superman, and they don’t know what to do with them. That’s like being a porn star with the biggest dick and you can’t get it up. What the fuck?”

As expected, DC and Paul Levitz declined to comment in print, but privately the feeling inside the company was that these comments represented a new low, a breaking point in the increasingly hostile relationship between the two rivals.

“To be compared to a porn star to begin with would drive Levitz mad, and then to be compared to one who can’t get it up and is wasting all these great characters, it’s like the long, dark night of the soul,” former DC editor Raspler says. “He was just tormented by this horrible shit. He was wound pretty tight.”

“The relationship between the companies has not been warm ever since,” says then-Marvel-editor Stuart Moore.

Relations got so frosty at the time that a rumor circulated, claiming DC had killed off Azrael, the Batman replacement cocreated years earlier by Joe Quesada, in an attempt to punish the Marvel editor-in-chief and to avoid paying him royalties for the character. Great story, but not true. Azrael’s solo series was canned and the title character snuffed in 2003 due simply to low sales.

Adding more juice to the rivalry was the 2002 hiring of Dan DiDio as DC’s vice president of editorial. DiDio was a native New Yorker with a bald head, a graying goatee and a brash, fuhgeddaboutit attitude that was closer to Marvel’s traditional persona than DC’s, leading one online commenter to label him “Bill Jemas Lite.” DiDio’s addition gave DC an aggressive, passionate public voice who, unlike Paul Levitz, was less likely to take the high road. (The wall outside DiDio’s office bore a dent from his fist when he once got upset.)

“Jemas and DiDio are much more inclined to get up in your face and say mean things,” says former Marvel staffer Gregg Schigiel. “Post-JLA/Avengers, things went poof. The rivalry became very antagonistic. It almost became like dueling fraternities.”

And like his Marvel counterpart, DiDio was an outsider to the industry. He’d previously spent his career working in TV, including soap operas and animation. And as an outsider, he, like Jemas, was less likely to bow to the industry’s unspoken customs or to do things a certain way simply because that’s the way they’d always been done.

DiDio set out to put his stamp on DC and to fix what he thought was wrong with it. The solution, as usual, meant moving it closer to Marvel, attempting to make DC’s fantastical universe and square characters more realistic, gritty, and relatable. It was the same problem DC had been grappling with since the 1960s.

“Our characters were created in the 1940’s and 50’s and 60’s,” DiDio said in 2005. “There’s a lot of elements where we’ve had a disconnect with the reader base of today.”

One of DiDio’s first big projects was Identity Crisis, a 2004 miniseries written by novelist Brad Meltzer that took grim and gritty to new heights and soon become one of the more controversial titles DC has ever published. The story found members of the Justice League investigating the brutal murder of the Elongated Man’s wife, Sue Dibny. That investigation soon uncovered dark secrets from the past, including that a villain had once raped Dibny aboard the JLA’s orbiting satellite headquarters. The heroes ended up giving the perpetrator a psychic lobotomy, and when Batman tried to interfere, they wiped his mind too.

“Identity Crisis was this flashback to the Justice League’s satellite days [during the 1970s], this magical time, but it was really dark and sinister,” says former DC editor Frank Pittarese. “DC kept overcompensating. It wasn’t like they were Marvelizing DC. They Marvelized it then added this layer of Quentin Tarantino over it. This gore factor started to creep in, this sexuality. That’s after Dan stepped in.”

In 2005 a villain named Maxwell Lord was shown graphically shooting wacky hero Blue Beetle through the head. Wonder Woman later murdered the killer by snapping his neck. Hey, kids! Comics!

DiDio and Jemas would not have long to match wits against each other, however.

“Jemas eventually got cast out,” says former Marvel publisher Shirrel Rhoades. “Some have likened it to God casting Satan out of heaven.”

During his tenure Jemas had increasingly run afoul of retailers, instituting policies that the store owners thought were damaging their business. He ordered that the stories in the monthly comic be written at a length and pace to ultimately be collected in trade paperbacks, and in 2001 Marvel started printing to order, meaning that once an issue had sold out, a retailer would be unable to order more.

“Fuck that guy in the neck, man,” Comix Experience owner Brian Hibbs says. “Jemas was the first executive at any publishing company that I’ve ever encountered who seriously did not give a fuck about what was going on with the market or whether the market was healthy or what he was doing was sustainable or logical. It’s someone coming in throwing bombs and stirring up shit and not really caring about the long-term ramifications of what his actions are.”

The Marvel executive also began meddling more in editorial, leading some creators to gripe about being micromanaged. Mark Waid, a fan-favorite writer, was fired in the midst of a well-received run on the Fantastic Four after he balked at Jemas’s orders to suddenly transplant Marvel’s first family to the suburbs and turn the magazine into a wacky dramedy.

By October 2003 Jemas had alienated many within Marvel and was on his way out. The move delighted those at DC, who had been praying for Jemas’s departure nearly from the day he got there. His exit, however, was not enough to completely reset relations between the companies. Quesada was still there, and as long as he remained, relations would remain chilly.

DC’s animosity was laid bare at an August 2004 convention in Chicago. There superstar Marvel writer Brian Michael Bendis was hosting a panel about his upcoming work when he mentioned his dream project, a potential team-up between Batman and Daredevil. Bendis asked the audience’s help in convincing DC to change its mind regarding intercompany crossovers.

“We went to Marvel, and Marvel said yes,” Bendis told the crowd. “Then we went to Paul Levitz. Paul Levitz said no.”

Suddenly a voice called out from the audience.

“Actually, that’s not entirely correct, Brian,” a man said, emerging from the back of the room.

The man turned out to be Bob Wayne, DC’s head of marketing. He and Bendis began arguing, to the shock—and delight—of the assembled fans.

“I asked personally [Paul] to reconsider,” Bendis told Wayne. “The reason he gave me for the no was a personal reason, that his relationship with Joe Quesada wasn’t one that he liked. And I said that I thought that it shouldn’t matter, that it was not a good reason.”

“We expressed our interest in doing Batman and Daredevil,” Wayne shot back, “and we said that we would be able to do it as soon as Joe Quesada is not at Marvel Comics. It’s a very simple request.”

“We’re down to one person we want to see gone from Marvel—there used to be two,” said Wayne, referencing the recently departed Jemas. “If there’s anything you can do to speed Joe out the door, we’ll be happy to get this on the schedule.”

Bendis reiterated that the fans and retailers were calling for the book and that there was no good reason not to do it. “You guys are just mad that Joe kicks your ass,” he said.

“The problem is the type of behavior that Joe exhibited in interviews like the one that ran in the New York Observer when he was completely over the line from what was appropriate behavior,” Wayne said shortly before stepping aside, ending the public argument. Bendis was left to jokingly lament that he’d never work for DC now.

With the competition heating up between the two companies, so did the competition for talent. Marvel, emboldened by its emergence from bankruptcy, set about poaching several of DC’s top employees, including Vertigo editor Axel Alonso in 2000 (he became Marvel’s editor-in-chief in 2011) and editor Stuart Moore, among others.

“It was a bold move,” says former DC editor Tom Palmer Jr. “It was a little frustrating because it seemed nothing was done about that. There was no, ‘Oh, we’ll grab some of those guys from Marvel.’ They were kind of like, ‘Oh, okay, they’re gone.’ We kind of moved on.”

The race to sign top talent to exclusive contracts heated up as well. The contracts locked down a freelance writer or artist for a particular period of time, keeping them out of the hands of the competition. In exchange the creator often got medical coverage and other perks as well as a signing bonus.

Exclusive contracts had been around since the industry’s early days, but they became more common as the years went by.

One of the first went to Irv Novick in the mid-1960s. Novick had been drawing DC war books edited by his friend Bob Kanigher, but he had left to take a job in advertising.

“Kanigher was really upset to lose Novick on his books,” historian Mark Evanier says.

DC was able to lure the artist back to comics by crafting a contract that paid him regularly and guaranteed him a certain amount of work.

Marvel began offering more attractive deals to creators in the 1980s. Select freelancers were given medical benefits and vacation, and their travel expenses to conventions were covered. Some artists got a continuity bonus, earning an extra $500 if they completed a certain number of issues in a row.

The dollar figures ramped up in the early 1990s, when the industry exploded and began to increasingly recognize that talent, as opposed to characters, drove sales. With just two major companies in the field, the talent could play them off one another to land the best deal.

“There was such competition for talent, especially after the defection of the Image guys, it became like a war of escalation between Marvel and DC,” former Marvel editor Bob Budiansky says.

“Around 1990 we really we started to bang against each other at both companies in trying to lock up talent with exclusive contracts,” says former DC editor Brian Augustyn. “Both companies were in a feeding frenzy for talent.”

The incentives for top creators had always been juicy. John Byrne, the architect of the mid eighties Superman reboot, was in part lured from Marvel with the promise that DC’s sister company, Warner Books, would publish his prose horror novel. And rumor has it that one creator had a single request to seal his defection in the 1970s: an Asian hooker.

The 1990s took the incentivizing to new heights. Talent was being wined and dined and offered exorbitant sums. Instead of paying by the page, as was the tradition, a company might guarantee an artist a flat sum—say, $5,000—per issue. And the superstars made more—much more.

“I was paying [X-Men artists] Andy and Adam Kubert each of them about a million dollars a year under a superstar contract,” says former Marvel publisher Shirrel Rhoades. “The artists that were big names, the Jim Lees and Kuberts, they demanded big money and got it.”

The problem DC had was that it simply couldn’t match its rival’s money. Marvel titles sold far more copies than DC, making it a more attractive destination to freelancers, who could make bank on the royalties.

“We were casting for The Flash after Greg LaRocque left [in 1993], and Steve Skroce had come in and he had shown his portfolio around. We gave him the gig,” recalls former DC editor Ruben Diaz. “Then he left the office, and unfortunately he stopped at Marvel and showed his stuff. We got a call a couple hours later that they offered him the Cable series, to which he then declined The Flash offer. He might have done better work on The Flash, but he was undeniably going to make more money on Cable.”

The battle for talent led the companies to institute a certain amount of secrecy. In the days before email was commonplace, phone calls were often how talent was lured. Phone numbers became like currency.

“I wanted to hire [DC artist] Frank Quitely for a [1999] variant cover of Avengers Forever, and I could not find this guy’s phone number anywhere,” says former Marvel editor Gregg Schigiel. “Then [editor] Marie Javins, who had gone back and forth between the two companies, had the DC Comics phone list, the talent list. Anyone who’d come from DC had it. That was a resource that we didn’t have at Marvel. DC was always the more professional organization. They had a phone list. Marvel was like, ‘Whatever. Here’s a Rolodex card. Scribble your number down.’ So Marie was the one who knew Frank Quitely was not his real name. His name is Vincent Deighan, and I was able to call him and get him to do the cover.”

“DC was very tight-lipped about sharing contact info,” says artist Joe St. Pierre. “I did a Batman job with an inker I liked named Ray McCarthy. I asked the Batman office, ‘Hey, could I get Ray’s number, because I want to tell him what an awesome job he did?’ They were like, ‘Uh, we’ll tell him for you.’ I was working at Marvel at the time, so it wouldn’t have been past me to say, ‘Hey, let’s get Ray for the next miniseries.’ DC was probably being protective.”

Marvel’s mid-1990s troubles cooled the talent wars somewhat, but by the early 2000s the contest grew hot again. Marvel was healthier financially, and on the other side DC’s Dan DiDio was determined to become more aggressive and proactive.

In 2003 DC stole away Grant Morrison, the Scotsman who was then writing Marvel’s New X-Men. They also locked up writer Jeph Loeb and artist Tim Sale, the team behind an acclaimed 1996 Batman miniseries, The Long Halloween.

Marvel brought Chris Claremont back into the fold in 2003. The writer had been removed from his X-Men book shortly after Quesada became editor-in-chief.

“One of Ike [Perlmutter’s] guys noticed that I was actively looking for work at DC, and the attitude was, the creator of Marvel’s biggest franchise is pitching himself to our competitor?” Claremont says. “And the next thing I knew, I was negotiating a contract at Marvel.”

Claremont reportedly remains under contract to this day and is forbidden from working for any company besides Marvel, despite the fact that he rarely produces new work for the publisher.

One person DC was able to poach during the decade was the biggest Marvel name of them all: Stan Lee. It came as quite a shock to readers and the industry when it was announced that the man who had been synonymous with Marvel for some sixty years was finally crossing over to write a special project called Just Imagine … to be released in late 2001. The series would be composed of thirteen stand-alone issues, allowing Lee to rework the origins of DC’s top heroes, including Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern.

The idea had come from Michael Uslan, the producer of the 1989 Batman film and a former DC writer. While at the film’s June 1989 premiere Lee and Batman cocreator Bob Kane had been good-naturedly ribbing each other about their various successes, with Lee insisting Batman would have been better if he’d had a hand in it and Kane claiming Spider-Man would have been more successful had he drawn it. The argument got Uslan thinking: What would Batman have been like if Lee had created him?

The idea remained on the back burner for several years until Marvel’s bankruptcy provided an opening.

“The reason Stan was able to go over to DC was because [Marvel boss Ike] Perlmutter decided to save money,” former Marvel publisher Shirrel Rhoades says. “When I was there I was paying Stan a million dollars a year, and I had it on good authority that Perelman’s people were paying him a separate million dollars a year that wasn’t on our books. Perlmutter canceled the contract to save money.”

The cancelation left Stan Lee, after some sixty years at Marvel, free to work for other companies. Uslan phoned Lee to float the idea.

“It would be great to get your take on how you would have done these characters if you were creating them,” Uslan told Lee.

“Hell, of course it would be interesting to do, but I have as much chance of doing those characters as a snowball in hell,” Lee replied.

Uslan contacted DC, and a couple of weeks later, the deal had been arranged. Lee was coming to DC. The man who cocreated the Marvel universe was going to be writing for the Distinguished Competition. To make up for the money Lee lost when his Marvel contract was canceled, DC agreed to pay him a million bucks for the series.

It was a big get for DC and made for some sensational headlines. But it’s up for debate how much the then-seventy-eight-year-old Lee actually contributed beyond his name.

“Was he that involved with them?” asks artist Jerry Ordway who drew Just Imagine Stan Lee’s JLA. “Ehhh.”

“We had a story conference with me, Stan Lee, editor Mike Carlin, and Michael Uslan,” Ordway says. “We spent two hours on the phone talking over what was going to happen, and then the phone call is ending and Stan says, ‘You got enough there to work with? You don’t need me to write anything do you?”

Carlin gave Ordway notes from the phone call, and he laid out and drew the story. Lee later dialogued it.

The Just Imagine … series didn’t impress critics and sold modestly, with each issue moving around thirty to forty thousand in the direct market. Some inside DC were also underwhelmed.

“It was a stunt, frankly,” says former DC editor Joan Hilty. “There was nothing organic about Stan Lee imagining Aquaman. We thought it was strange around the office. It was a fun, brief idea, but I don’t know exactly what the motive was. I think you could argue that it did have the effect of subconsciously saying to the editors, ‘Your ideas aren’t good enough. We need Stan Lee.’”

Marvel was also displeased to see its public face working for the competition, and the company quickly drafted a new contract to recapture Lee. Marvel had a more pressing reason to regain its editor emeritus, beyond just PR.

“Stan’s contract implied that his employment gave Marvel rights to the characters he created, so by canceling the contract, there was a legal argument that the characters reverted to Stan,” Rhoades says. “They eventually hired him back. I think they gave him $500,000 a year and required only 10 percent of his time.”

The Just Imagine line quickly faded from memory, ending up little more than an interesting footnote in comic book history, and it appears that DC would rather it be forgotten as well. Many of the characters Lee created for the series were shown being slaughtered by murderous cyborgs in DC’s 2015 event called Convergence. Which seems about right, considering how relations had gone between the two companies in the twenty-first century.